Class, gender and insanity in nineteenth-century Wales

This chapter shows how class and gender defined the experiences of patients admitted to the North Wales Lunatic Asylum during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although not lending support to the notion that the asylum was predominantly an instrument of class and gender oppression, it does illustrate how threats of banishment to the asylum could be utilised to reinforce norms of social behaviour outside the institution in far-flung communities across north Wales. It suggests that lay rather than professional encounters were critical in the social construction of madness and the enforcement of social control.